Pre-planning
Screenshot from the movie
When Peter took up the position of Media Studies teacher at Havelock North Intermediate in mid-2008, he continued to run the programme under the Arts curriculum. However, when Technology implementation coordinator Doug Sutherland saw what Peter was doing with the Year 7 students he could see a natural link to the Technology curriculum. "A lot of the processes he was working through were similar to what I was working through in developing an outcome."
Doug approached Peter in term 4 and suggested that he might like to be involved in the forthcoming professional development sessions on incorporating the Technology curriculum into teaching programmes. Participants were at different stages in teaching Technology – some instigating the change to Technology, others developing their programme, and Doug was adjusting from teaching full-year programmes in a secondary school (Year 9 to Year 13 Scholarship) to three-week Year 7/8 programmes.
Peter says that he didn't know anything about the Technology curriculum, or how Media Studies might fit into it, but was interested in being part of that development process. He attended the first meeting as an observer, unsure as to whether he could fit what he was doing into the Technology curriculum. He realised that it wasn't difficult to understand and that concepts such as brief development could fit into his unit, and decided that he would give it a go and see how it worked.
The movie set
Peter discussed his programme with Heather who pointed out that some of what he was doing already worked with the Technology curriculum. She explained that his students already did planning and storyboarding, which directly matched with Technology and that although they didn't develop the brief in terms of a conceptual statement they already worked on identifying the key attributes a good video would have. Heather says that Peter's students were mocking-up and modelling aspects of their work, trialling things, getting feedback, and then redoing aspects, so that his programme fitted nicely into the Technology curriculum and required very little tweaking.
A key aim of the professional development was to develop a seamless progression from Year 7 to Year 13 Technology, and during the early stages the whole team, with Heather, had visited the Technology team at Havelock North High School to gain an understanding of how Technology was delivered and assessed from Year 9 to Year 13 (the majority of the high school students come from the intermediate). From this visit the team was able to develop a strategic plan to develop programmes that would allow for progression from Year 8 to Year 9 while also meeting the needs of the new curriculum.
Throughout the year, as Peter delivered his course to consecutive Year 7 classes in 2009 and attended the workshops, he discussed his unit with Heather and how well it was fitting with Technology. She had suggested that, although there was already a lot of oral discussion as his students developed their video, Peter also needed to gather more permanent evidence of this aspect of their work.
